9. Gore - Blood Feast (1963)
Herschell Gordon Lewis is an extremely eloquent and avuncular man. In his early career he was an English Professor but he gave this up to enter the film business. Along with exploitation cinema pioneer - David Friedman - he came up with the idea of gore to make money at the drive ins. Their first gore picture was 1963's Blood Feast which featured a mad Egyptian caterer called Fuad who goes around mutilating and dismembering women to create an altar to Ishtar. This level of bloody mayhem - limbs sawn off, unfeasibly long tongues ripped out of mouths - had never been shown in cinema before. Pope of Trash - John Waters -caught the movie at a drive in and when he saw teenagers jumping out of their cars to puke at Lewis film, he had an epiphany moment of what he wanted to do with his life. Still disturbing enough in 1983 to be prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act in Britain during the Video Nasty scare, Blood Feast, and the rest of Lewis' catalogue, was not widely available in the UK until Tartan championed them in the noughties. Looking at Blood Feast today, the film is one of the shoddiest ever made and films such as Hostel, Saw and Martyrs dwarf it in the unpleasant gore stakes.